The man who runs bookstores

James Daunt, sixty-three, is chief executive of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, the largest bookstore chains in the United States and United Kingdom. He oversees more than a thousand stores and nearly twenty thousand employees.

A bookseller's empire

Daunt founded Daunt Books, a London independent bookshop whose tote bag was included in the Victoria and Albert Museum's 2020 exhibition of influential bags alongside a Chanel specimen.

Four billion dollars in sales

Daunt presides over four billion dollars annually in sales across more than a thousand stores. A major American publisher said he controls more than twenty percent of the entire market.

“He controls more than twenty per cent of our entire market. He is, I think, respected, and feared.”

From banker to bookseller

After studying history at Cambridge, Daunt worked as a junior banker at Morgan Guaranty Trust Company in New York. His wife Katy Steward wanted him to leave finance, so he decided to open a bookstore.

The idea takes shape

Daunt realized that bookstores jumbled history and fiction together. He imagined regional sections grouping novels, poetry, histories, and guidebooks by place, so readers could explore a location comprehensively.

Opening on Marylebone High Street

In 1990, Daunt opened his shop on the Ides of March in a purpose-built space on Marylebone High Street with stained glass, skylights, and a mezzanine. He was twenty-six years old.

A difficult start

The shop opened during a UK recession when Marylebone High Street became a retail wasteland.Daunt recalled it was a disaster, with a staff of three or four in a large shop with no retail experience.

“It was a disaster.”

Trial and error builds a model

Daunt and his staff discovered that placing books cover-out, arranging them on circular tables, and tilting shelves at exactly three degrees optimized light and customer attention. Single-title windows drew passersby.

Exceptional sales power

When Daunt Books gave a paperback the full treatment with a window, display, and bookseller effort, it could move a hundred and thirty copies a week.

Waterstones in crisis

By 2011, Waterstones, operating three hundred stores, was failing under the HMV Group, which had centralized operations and optimized pipelines. Daunt was approached to help save the chain.

A Russian businessman steps in

Alexander Mamut, a Russian investor and prolific reader, bought Waterstones for fifty-three million pounds in 2011 with Daunt as managing director. Mamut said it cost less than footballer Fernando Torres.

“That's less than Fernando Torres. It's not even half a boat.”

Radical restructuring at Waterstones

Daunt asked all four hundred home office employees to reapply for their jobs and fired two hundred. He spent three months interviewing staff and decentralized decision-making so each store could stock books independently.

The turnaround by numbers

Returns fell from twenty-five percent of stock to four percent. Waterstones' forty-three-million-pound loss in 2011 became an eighteen-million-pound profit by 2017. The company began opening dozens of new stores.

Consolidation of British bookselling

In 2021, Waterstones bought Foyles. In 2022, it bought Blackwell's. Both owners had contacted Daunt personally to offer him their failing enterprises. Daunt applied his rescue method: do nothing for a year, then invest.

Elliott takes Barnes & Noble private

Elliott Management, which owned Waterstones, acquired Barnes & Noble for six hundred and eighty-three million dollars inclusive of debt in 2019.Daunt told Elliott the chain was doing the same things wrong that Waterstones had been.

Reading is not declining

Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five percent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-percent increase since 2020.

Daunt's philosophy on books

Daunt holds that books are not like laundry detergent. Every decision comes down to whether the specific thing in front of you is good enough to draw you in. He believes bookstores build literary culture.

“Books aren't a fixed market. The more bookshops there are, the more people will read.”

Decentralizing Barnes & Noble

When Daunt took the helm of Barnes & Noble in 2019, his most urgent reform was to loosen centralized control, encouraging every store to select and present stock as if it were independent.

The pandemic accelerates reform

The pandemic forced Barnes & Noble to close stores, but Daunt used the closures to accelerate his reforms.He remade more than six hundred stores into welcoming, browsable spaces with human fingerprints.

A resurgence for brick-and-mortar

Elliott Management is widely expected to take Barnes & Noble and Waterstones public next year at a total valuation of at least three billion dollars.